What a shocking development. The US media loves a front runner. You could knock me over with a feather I’m so amazed at this startling development which, if Howie Kurtz is writing about it means that it must be the new, Broder approved, post-Iowa Beltway conventional wisdom. Just read the lead paragraph, and you’ll see what I’m talking about:
Barack Obama, now the media’s odds-on favorite to win the White House, is drawing effusive praise from the chattering classes.
Yep, you read that correctly. Obama is now the media’s odds-on favorite, not just for the nomination but to win the whole White House shebang! Imagine that just a short time ago Hillary’s nomination and subsequent presidency was considered inevitable. To blenderize a few metaphors, how quickly the rats have abandoned The Good Ship HRC and hopped aboard Obama’s Bandwagon of Hope. But that’s all a good pundit or “journalist” needs these days: either a poor short term memory, or the ability to deliberately ignore whatever you’ve written or said about the presidential race before when the Beltway herd shifts direction. And shifted they have:
“You’d have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by this. . . . This is a huge moment,” one commentator wrote.
An unreconstructed liberal? An African American hungering for a racial breakthrough? No, it was David Brooks, the conservative New York Times columnist, and he’s got plenty of company on the right.
The media overall are being swept up by a wave of Obamamania, in which normally hard-bitten journalists watch the orator in action and come away dazzled by his gifts. A New York Times piece Saturday compared the Illinois senator to JFK and Martin Luther King in the same paragraph. A Newsweek cover story out yesterday gushed that Obama, “tall and handsome and blessed with a weighty baritone, knows how to bring along a crowd while seeming to stay slightly above it.” The journalistic scrutiny usually visited on instant front-runners has been replaced by something akin to a standing ovation. […]
In the wake of Obama’s remarks about unity on the night of his Iowa caucus victory Thursday, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman and self-described conservative, called it “one of the most remarkable speeches I’ve ever seen.”
Bill Bennett, the conservative author, said on CNN that it was a “remarkable breakthrough” for “Barack Hussein Obama, a black man,” to win in a “rural, white farming state.” Rush Limbaugh added his voice on the radio, saying that Obama and Mike Huckabee, the Republican winner in Iowa, “had really uplifting, inspirational speeches.”
Now, those are some Grade A fluffers for you! David Brooks, NEWSWEEK magazine, The fricking New York Times, Bill Bennet and even Rush “Don’t kill all the liberals” Limbaugh all had something nice to say, and most went way, way overboard on the effusiveness scale. Suddenly, the man our Media Masters recently claimed was stumbling on the campaign trail now has both the integrity and gravitas of Martin Luther King combined with the glitz and glamor of John F. Kennedy! I guess elections do have consequences, or at least Iowa caucuses do.
No wonder Obama has been repeating the dual mantras “bi-partisanship” and “change” at every campaign rally, much like an old two bit carnie hypnotist. He knew that the media wanted two things. First, to discover that mythical beast known as the “centrist candidate” to which they could pin their blithering tales too. And the second? Any excuse to kick a Clinton to the curb, and in particular, this Clinton, whom they have never liked and don’t like now.
Still, I have to wonder, once Hillary is gone from the campaign trail, how quickly the media mavens sucking up to Obama will return to all those negative stories about him that they were fertilizing the airwaves with pushing before this sudden change of heart. Stories like the phony “Obama was educated in an Islamic Madrassa school”. Or the one that claimed he’s not really a Christian because he belongs to a Black Separatist church. Or the weird obsession with his middle and last names. Or the even more bizarre story that he’s not black enough. Or that a black man running for President in America simply isn’t electable.
Not very damn long is my prediction.
So enjoy your honeymoon with the chattering classes while it lasts Senator. Just remember that while they view you as a sexy beast now, and moon over every word that issues forth from from your elegant lips, I wouldn’t bet on them respecting you in the morning. Hell, I wouldn’t bet on them respecting you now.
